[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 21 (Tuesday, March 1, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1870-S1872]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
By Mr. LEAHY:
S. 478. A bill to designate the annex to the E. Barrett Prettyman
Federal Building and United States Courthouse located at 333
Constitution Avenue Northwest in the District of Columbia as the
``William B. Bryant Annex''; to the Committee on Environment and Public
Works.
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I am pleased to call attention to the
extraordinary public service of Judge William B. Bryant. Last July, I
introduced S. 2619, a bill that would have designated the new annex to
the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, D.C.,
the ``William B. Bryant Annex.'' It was the Senate companion bill to
legislation introduced by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton of the
District of Columbia.
While the House bill passed by voice vote, the Senate bill was
stalled by objection. There was concern that a courthouse annex be
named for a judge still serving. This objection was adhered to despite
the numerous exceptions to such a rule, including another exception
enacted last year.
It would have been worthy of celebration this last month, during
Black History Month, if we could have held such a naming ceremony
involving Judge Bryant. Others prevented that from taking place. I
believe it important that we continue every month to recognize the
extraordinary contributions of African Americans. Congresswoman Norton
has been willing to seek to accommodate those Senators who objected by
revising this bill to delay the effective date of the naming until
after Judge Bryant steps down from the Court. It is sadly ironic that
Judge Bryant's continuing historic service is held against honoring
him. He continues to perform duties as a senior
[[Page S1871]]
Federal judge at the age of 93. I commend Congresswoman Norton for her
efforts and determination. I hope that this change will remove the
final impediment and allow the District of Columbia and the Nation to
honor Judge Bryant before his 94th birthday this September.
The value of Judge Bryant's service has been recognized by his
colleagues. Judge Bryant and his lifelong service to the law was
celebrated in a September 16, 2004 Washington Post article. The article
details a life spent dedicated to public service.
Judge Bryant began his legal career with the belief that lawyers
could make a difference in eliminating the widespread racial
segregation in the United States. He became a criminal defense lawyer
in 1948, taking on many pro bono cases and was soon recognized by the
U.S. Attorney's office for his skills as a defense attorney. The U.S.
Attorney's office hired him in 1951 and he became the first African
American to practice in Federal court here in the District.
Judge Bryant was nominated by President Johnson to the Federal bench
in 1965 and became the first African American Chief Judge for the
United States District Court in D.C. Forty years later, Judge Bryant
still works at the courthouse four days a week and the Washington Post
reports that he handled more criminal trials than any other senior
judge on the court last year. Judge Bryant said in an interview with
the Post: ``I feel like I'm part of the woodwork. I have to think hard
to think of a time when I wasn't in this courthouse.''
The Washington Post article mentions that E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr.,
the son of the judge for whom the Federal courthouse is named, praised
the recommendation that the annex be named after Judge Bryant. He said
that his father ``admired Judge Bryant tremendously'' and would have
wanted the annex to be named after him.
Before my introduction of this bill last year, Chief Judge Thomas F.
Hogan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia,
requested for himself and all the other judges on the court that the
newly constructed annex be named after Judge Bryant. They appreciate
the historic significance of Judge Bryant's service.
I urge the Senate this year to move ahead with this important
commendation of Judge Bryant's lifetime of service and dedication to
the principles of the Constitution and the law.
I ask unanimous consent that an article and the text of the bill be
printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Washington Post, Sept. 16, 2004]
A Lifetime of Faith in the Law; at 93, Senior Judge William Bryant
Still Wins Plaudits for Dedication to Justice
(By Carol Leonnig)
A few days after the new U.S. District Courthouse opened on
Constitution Avenue in the fall of 1952, Bill Bryant walked
in to start work as a recently hired federal prosecutor.
More than a half-century has passed, and Bryant's life
remains centered on that stately granite building in the
shadow of the U.S. Capitol. It's in those halls that he
became a groundbreaking criminal defense attorney, a federal
judge, and then the court's chief judge--the first African
American in that position.
Today, at the age of 93, U.S. District Court Senior Judge
William Bryant still drives himself to work at the courthouse
four days a week and pushes his walker to his courtroom.
At a recent birthday party for Bryant hosted by Vernon
Jordan, fellow Senior U.S. District Court Judge Louis
Oberdorfer remarked that there were ``only two people in the
world who really understood the Constitution'' and how it
touched the lives of real people.
``That's Hugo Black and Bill Bryant,'' said Oberdorfer. He
had clerked for Justice Hugo L. Black, who retired as an
associate justice in 1971 after serving on the Supreme Court
for 34 years.
To honor Bryant's life's work, his fellow judges this past
spring unanimously recommended that a nearly completed
courthouse annex be named for him. The $110 million, 351,000-
square-foot addition will add nine state-of-the-art
courtrooms and judges' offices to the courthouse and is
designed to meet the court's expansion needs for the next 30
years. It is slated to open next spring.
In urging that the building be named for Bryant, his
supporters cite his devotion to the Constitution and his
belief that the law will produce a just result.
During a rare interview in his sixth-floor office in the
federal courthouse, Bryant reached out for a pocket version
of the Constitution covered in torn green plastic lying on
the top of his desk. Holding it aloft in his right hand, he
told stories of his struggling former clients and made legal
phrases--``due process'' and ``equal protection''--seem like
life-saving staples.
Though he needs his law clerk's arm to get up the steps to
the bench, he is a fairly busy senior jurist. He handled more
criminal trials than any other senior judge last year and
still surprises new lawyers with his sharp retorts.
``I feel like I'm part of the woodwork,'' Bryant said. ``I
have to think hard to think of a time when I wasn't in this
courthouse.''
He started down his career path inspired by a Howard
University law professor who believed that lawyers could make
a difference in that time of racial segregation and
discrimination. Bryant said he remains convinced today that
lawyers can stop injustice whenever it arises.
``Without lawyers, this is just a piece of paper,'' Judge
Bryant said, gesturing with the well-worn Constitution. ``If
it weren't for lawyers, I'd still be three-fifths of a man.
If it weren't for lawyers, we'd still have signs directing
people this way and that, based on the color of their skin.
If it weren't for lawyers, you still wouldn't be able to
vote.
``The most important professions are lawyer and teacher, in
my opinion,'' he said.
Some lawyers complain that Bryant is so rooted in his
criminal defense training that he shows some distrust of the
prosecution. And his practice of presiding over trials, but
asking other judges to sentence the people convicted, has
spurred some curiosity. He won't elaborate on the reason, but
his friends say he found the new federal sentencing
guidelines inflexible and harsh.
A 1993 study found Bryant was reversed 17 percent of the
time by appellate judges--the average reversal rate for the
trial court.
Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan presented the proposal to name
the annex after Bryant to Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and Sen.
Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) earlier this year, and they are now
trying to get Congress to approve the naming this fall. One
member, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), has tried to block
it, with his staff pointing to a D.C. policy that buildings
not be named after living people.
Norton said numerous courts around the country have been
named in honor of living judges, and she said she looks
forward to meeting with Inhofe in person to convince him of
the wisdom of naming this building, designed by renowned
architect Michael Graves, after a barrier-breaking judge.
``This is no ordinary naming,'' she said. ``This is a truly
great African American judge whose accomplishments are
singular. First African American assistant U.S. attorney.
First African American chief judge.''
E. Barrett Prettyman Jr., the son of the jurist for whom
the federal courthouse in Washington is named, also applauds
the proposed annex naming. He said his father ``admired Judge
Bryant tremendously'' and would have endorsed it, too.
``Whenever it's discussed, people brighten right up and
think it's a great idea,'' said Prettyman, himself a former
president of the D.C. Bar Association. ``I'm sorry it's hit
this snag. . . . If you were going to have an exception, my
personal opinion is you could not have a better exception
than for Judge Bryant.''
William Benson Bryant is hailed as a true product of
Washington. Though he was born in a rural town in Alabama, he
moved to the city soon after turning 1. His grandfather,
fleeing a white lynch mob, relocated the extended family
here, including Bryant's father, a railroad porter, and his
mother, a housewife. They all made their first home on
Benning Road, which was then a dirt path hugging the eastern
shore of the Anacostia River.
Bryant attended D.C. public schools when the city's black
children were taught in separate and grossly substandard
facilities. Still he flourished, studying politics at the
city's premier black high school, Dunbar, then going on to
Howard University. While working at night as an elevator
operator, he studied law and met his future wife, Astaire.
They were married for 60 years, until her death in 1997.
He and his law classmates--the future civil rights
movement's intellectual warriors--worked at their dreams in
the basement office of their law professor, Charles Houston.
Houston promised the group, which included the future Supreme
Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and appellate judge
Spottswood Robinson, that lawyers armed with quick minds and
the Constitution could end segregated schools and unjust
convictions of innocent black men.
``I kind of got fascinated by that,'' he said. ``We all
did.''
But when Bryant graduated first in his class from Howard's
law school, there were no jobs for a black lawyer. He became
a chief research assistant to Ralph Bunche, an African
American diplomat who later was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize, on a landmark study of American race relations; he
then fought in World War II and was discharged from the Army
as a lieutenant colonel in 1947.
His first step was to take the bar exam, then hang out a
shingle as a criminal defense lawyer in 1948. His skills soon
drew the attention of prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's
Office, who liked him even though they kept losing cases to
him, and they recommended that their boss hire him. During a
job interview, Bryant made a request of George Fay,
[[Page S1872]]
then the U.S. attorney: ``Mr. Fay, if I cut the mustard in
municipal court, can I go over to the big court like the
other guys?''
No black prosecutor had ever practiced in the federal
court--or ``big court,'' as it was called--but Fay agreed.
Bryant signed on in 1951 and was handling grand jury
indictments in the new federal courthouse the next year.
Bryant vividly recalls a case from that time involving an
apartment building caretaker who was on trial on charges of
raping the babysitter of one tenant's family.
``I went for him as hard as I could,'' Bryant said,
squaring his shoulders. ``I didn't like him, and I didn't
like what he did to that girl.''
So the young prosecutor sought the death penalty, an option
then for first-degree murder and rape. He left the courtroom
after closing arguments ``feeling pretty good about my case''
and awaited the jury's verdict in his third-floor court
office. But when a marshal later called out, ``Bryant,
jury's back,'' the judge said, ``I broke out in a sweat.''
He peeked anxiously into the court, saw the jury foreman
mouth only the word ``guilty.'' Bryant learned seconds later
that the jurors had spared the man's life.
``I was so relieved,'' he said. ``When you're young, you
don't know anything. . . . Now I think, murder is murder, no
matter who is doing it.''
He left the prosecutor's office in 1954 and returned to
criminal defense with fellow classmate William Gardner in an
F Street law office later bulldozed for the MCI Center. They
were partners in Houston, Bryant and Gardner, a legendarily
powerful African American firm. Ten judges would eventually
come from its ranks.
In those days, Bryant chuckled, he didn't feel so powerful.
Judges who remembered his prosecution work kept appointing
him to represent defendants who had no money. That was before
the 1963 Supreme Court's Gideon decision requiring that
indigent defendants be represented by a lawyer--at public
expense, if necessary.
``The judge would say, `Mr. So and So, you say you don't
have any money to hire an attorney?' '' Bryant recalled. ``
`Well, then, the court appoints Mr. Bryant to represent you.'
''
Some paid $25 or $50. Some paid nothing.
``There were weeks we paid the help and split the little
bit left over for our groceries,'' he said.
Bill Schultz, Bryant's former law clerk, said Bryant took
the cases ``out of this sense of obligation to the court and
legal system. He was very aware of discrimination, and he
always fought for the criminal defendants.''
At the time, blacks were barred from the D.C. Bar
Association and its law library. Bryant went in anyway, and
the black librarian let him.
One of his pro bono clients was Andrew Roosevelt Mallory, a
19-year-old who confessed to a rape after an eight-hour
interrogation in a police station. Mallory was convicted and
sent to death row. Defending Mallory's rights, a case Bryant
took all the way to the Supreme Court in 1957, made him both
nervous and famous.
He said he fretted constantly about his client facing the
electric chair during the two years the case dragged on.
``You talk about worried,'' he said. ``It's something I can't
forget.''
But the Supreme Court agreed with Bryant that a man accused
of a crime is entitled to be taken promptly before a
magistrate to hear the charges against him. The court
overturned Mallory's conviction and handed down a landmark
decision on defendants' rights.
U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman, a longtime fan of
Bryant's, said Bryant's legal talents are on display every
day in his courtroom, but lawyers are still taken aback by
his factual resolve and clear logic when hearing an audiotape
recording of his Supreme Court argument in the Mallory case.
``He's clearly a terrific lawyer, but he's mostly a
terrific human being,'' Friedman said. ``He sees the best in
people, and he really cares about what happens to people.''
Bryant remembers that when President Lyndon B. Johnson
nominated him to be a judge, he felt elated, confident he had
earned his opportunity. But Bryant said a different feeling
came over him the day he donned the robes.
``I was sworn in in the morning that day, and Oliver Gasch
was sworn in that afternoon,'' Bryant recalled. ``I told
Oliver, `You know, I've been a lawyer for many years, but
putting on this robe, I don't feel so sure. This is a serious
responsibility. ' ''
Gasch smiled: ``Bill, I don't think it's going to be that
hard for you. You know right from wrong.''
Bryant oversaw some famous cases, and he freely shared his
thoughts when he thought something was wrong.
After presiding over the 1981 trial of Richard Kelly, a
Republican congressman caught on videotape taking money from
federal agents in a sting operation, Bryant complained that
the FBI had set an ``outrageous'' trap for the Florida
representative by stuffing cash in his pocket after he'd
refused the bribe several times. He set aside Kelly's
conviction.
``The investigation . . . has an odor to it that is
absolutely repulsive,'' Bryant said then. ``It stinks.''
In handling the longest-running case in the court's
history, a 25-year-old case about inhumane and filthy
conditions in the D.C. jail, the judge chastised city leaders
in 1995. He said he had been listening to their broken
promises to fix the problems ``since the Big Dipper was a
thimble.''
In weighing the case of a group of black farmers with
similar discrimination complaints against the U.S. Department
of Agriculture in 2000, Bryant warned a government lawyer
that his argument against a class-action discrimination suit
wasn't working: ``Either you're dense or I'm dense,'' he
said.
Schultz said the judge simply trusted the combination of
facts and the law.
``He always said, `Don't fight the facts,' '' Schultz said.
``He thought most of the time the law would end up in the
right place.''
Bryant acknowledges it's hard sometimes to see lawyers
struggle to make their arguments when they have the law and
the facts on their side.
``A judge has a stationary gun, and he's looking through
the sights,'' he said. ``Unless the lawyer brings the case
into the bull's-eye, the judge can't pull the trigger. Good
lawyers bring the case into the sights.''
Bryant said he was preceded by many great lawyers, which is
why the new plan to put his name on a piece of the courthouse
gives him conflicting feelings.
``I was flattered, but I thought they shouldn't have done
it,'' Bryant said. ``There are so many people who were really
giants. I stand on their shoulders.''
____
S. 478
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. DESIGNATION.
The annex to the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Building and
United States Courthouse located at Constitution Avenue
Northwest in the District of Columbia shall be known and
designated as the ``William B. Bryant Annex''.
SEC. 2. REFERENCES.
Any reference in a law, map, regulation, document, paper,
or other record of the United States to the annex referred to
in section 1 shall be deemed to be a reference to the
``William B. Bryant Annex''.
SEC. 3. EFFECTIVE DATE.
This Act takes effect on the date on which William B.
Bryant, a senior judge for the United States District Court
for the District of Columbia, relinquishes or otherwise
ceases to hold a position as a judge under article III of the
Constitution.
______